


Care and Comfort(?)

by Antiago



Category: Tiger & Bunny
Genre: Barnaby has Feelings, Jerkface Barnaby, M/M, Sick Kotetsu, and Hates it., but mostly H, h/c, preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 21:59:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1202095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Antiago/pseuds/Antiago
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kotetsu is sick. Barnaby is a trained jerkface. Their secretary doesn't actually murder anyone (yet).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Care and Comfort(?)

Kotetsu was wet, and cold.   
No. Kotetsu was wet and _freezing._

He could have sworn that he'd been wet and warm just minutes ago, when he'd clambered into the shower. But he'd gotten dizzy, and leaned against the wall, and...

...And he could have also sworn that he'd remembered to take his clothes off, but no. Here he was, shivering, fully clothed, and with the shower running colder than Karina on a bad day. 

After about four tries, spaced over five and ten minute intervals in which moving seemed like a lot more trouble than not moving, he managed to shut off the water. _Victory!_ He flopped back against the wall, his knees slipping out from under him, and only managed to save his head from the hard plastic by getting his elbow there first. 

That was when he noticed the flashing call sign on his wristband. 

Lifting his wrist to his mouth didn't seem practical at the moment. On the other hand, slumping down so that his mouth was on a level with his wrist was easy, because gravity had been about to make him do that anyway. 

“Urk?” he croaked. Then he cleared his throat, dragged his wrist closer, and tried again. “Mm'here. 'Lo?”

“Old man?”

Ah.

Not good. 

Agnes would have been fine. Lloyds would have been fine. They'd just scold, or, at worst, ask difficult and metaphysical questions like 'Can you come back to work tomorrow?' to which he'd say 'Yes' because when you were a hero you didn't say things like 'Maybe.' You said yes. And then you made it yes, even when it very definitely wanted to be 'No.'

But Bunny, now, Bunny was his partner, and a partner might worry. Heroes shouldn't make people worry about them.

“Here,” he said, trying to sound like someone who wasn't worried about vomiting onto his communication system.

He wished the world would stay still and stop spinning. That might help.

“Still alive?” Bunny didn't sound like he was worrying. Bunny mostly just sounded annoyed. But then, Bunny always mostly just sounded annoyed when he was talking to Kotetsu, unless there were camera's involved, in which case he sounded nice while saying annoying things. Sometimes, times like now, Bunny sounded annoyed and said annoying things at the same time, and that was really too much. 

“Alive and --- kicking, lil'Bunny.”

O.K. that was lame, even by Kotetsu's standards, but not too bad considering the circumstances. 

“It's _Barnaby!_ ” 

Kotetsu grinned reflexively. He also winced, because that little spike in volume hadn't done anything pleasant for his aching head.   
Still. _Score._

Bunny made a disgruntled “tch” noise, regaining his vaguely condescending composure with an audible effort. “Anyway. Hurry up and get better. I can't be a team by myself.”

Kotetsu stared at the edge of the bathtub. The bathtub wasn't particularly deep, it was really just a shallow tray to keep water from splashing out. But from this angle, with his cheek pressed to the floor, the side looked like the bottom of a cliff.

“I'm... working on it.”

“. . .”

Kotetsu waited for Bunny to hang up. That would be the Bunny-like thing to do right now, because for a bunny, he wasn't cute at all. Not that Kotetsu minded: the sooner this conversation ended, the better. Instead, Bunny chose that moment to become unpredictable. 

“You need anything?”

Kotetsu blinked. He studied the cliff of a bathtub side. He rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling, and contemplated that for a second. Even after all that intense eyeballing of boring surfaces, his most intelligent response was still “Huh?”

“I told you,” Bunny snapped, sounding more exasperated than ever, “I can't be a team on my own. This is for the company.” He didn't add the 'Not for you' bit out loud. He didn't need to. That message had been spelled out clearly from day one. “Do. You. Need. Anything?”

Kotetsu blinked water out of his eyes (cold water from the shower, obviously, not suspiciously warm water that stung his eyes) and drew his knees in a little closer to his chest. He was shivering, his head ached, his waterlogged shoes were still on his feet and he figured that undoing wet shoelaces in his current state was going to be about as tricky as disarming a bomb. 

“...No.” He mumbled.

“What?”

Kotetsu cleared his throat. “Nope! 'S all under control.” 

“...Right. Then I'll see you tomorrow.”  
It wasn't a question.

Kotetsu lay still for a few moments after the line went dead, contemplating the next challenge.  
 _Alright, Kotetsu T. Kaburagi. Time to move._

All he had to do was get out of the shower, peel off his wet clothes, and climb into bed. He did harder things than that every day. Kaede did harder things than that every day when she was in _preschool._

But most days Kotetsu didn't feel like some unwanted, day-old kitten who'd just been mostly drowned by an amateur kitten-killer.

_You can do this. You're a hero. Be heroic, damn it!_

Obediently, Kotetsu heroically slithered over the edge of the tub and landed on the bathroom floor with a soggy thump.

Then he promptly leaned back over the side of the tub, and threw up something that had tasted bad enough going the other way.  
Ugh.

He'd have to clean that up, but... later. Better keep things simple for now. First, he needed to stand up. The toilet might help with that, since it was in reaching distance and relatively low to the ground. He got his arms on the lid and levered himself upright. 

Kotetsu completed the maneuver the same way he preferred to do most unpleasant and difficult things: as quickly and forcefully as possible.

About a second before his head hit the floor, he decided that hadn't been a good idea.

\- - -

_“He's not answering his phone.”  
“Let's just find someone to wear his suit for today, it's not like he—”  
“--Honestly, don't know why you hired him--”_

Barnaby Brooks Jr. had perfectly reasonable reasons for volunteering to 'check on' (a.k.a., abduct and deliver) his partner. 

Tiger had _paperwork_ to fill out.

Barnaby wasn't going to do it for him. Technically the secretary could handle it, but Barnaby wanted to avoid the inconvenience of a murder investigation, not to mention the headache of acquiring a less-dead partner. Tiger hadn't been making friends in the paperwork department, and it wasn't wise to anger a woman who knew her way around scissors and staplers. 

Barnaby hadn't offered to make this trip out of concern, camaraderie, or anything like that. Even if he'd been inclined, there was _nothing_ to be concerned about. In fact, Barnaby fully expected to find the old man sleeping. 

Which, he did. 

\--Except that he'd been expecting to find the old man sleeping on his bed, where sensible people normally slept, and not sleeping in a puddle on the chilly bathroom floor with a soggy rug wrapped around his shoulders.

That's. _It._

Normally, in circumstances like these, Barnaby would have called someone. The man had friends, right? Antonio, maybe Nathan. But Antonio or Nathan might have been _nice_ , and Barnaby had no intention of facilitating “nice” towards the idiot who'd passed out on his own bathroom floor because he was too stupid to tell anyone how sick he was. 

Didn't this hypocrite lecture nonstop about getting enough food and sleep? Looked like the old man needed to listen to himself sometimes.

Or, preferably, just learn to shut up.

Barnaby made up his mind. Maybe if the old man had a taste of his own meddling, he'd finally take the hint. This was a perfect opportunity to teach Tiger a lesson about minding his own business.

\- - -

“Old man.”

Kotetsu woke up to a menacing voice, and a pair of red boots dominating his field of vision. 

He had a really bad feeling about that, and the feeling got worse when he tilted his head and looked up-- and further up-- and got a decent look at the face glaring down at him.

“Ey, Bunny.” he said. Or, tried to say. All that came out was a raspy sort of croak, and a coughing fit that made him feel like his head was going to crack. 

Bunny didn't look cute or friendly. Bunny looked decidedly _not_ cute and friendly. 

The decidedly-not-cute-and-friendly face of Bunny got closer, as Bunny knelt down. 

“You're late for work.”

Oh. _Damn._

\- - -

Bunny left. Kotetsu wondered if he was just going to _leave_ leave.

 _That wouldn't be a bad thing,_ he told himself, trying to lie to the panic clawing at his insides. By then, it had occurred to him that he might be in real trouble. 

But Bunny didn't leave. He stood outside the bathroom door, talking to someone on his phone. _“I'll deal with him,”_ he told whoever it was, the only bit of the conversation which Kotetsu could make out. Somehow, the promise didn't sound reassuring. 

Kotetsu tried to move. His limbs seamed unreasonably heavy, fingers and arms and legs and feet all made out of lead. A lot of him hurt, and all of him was cold. Even so, he refused to be this pathetic in front of someone he had to work with. He just had to--

\--Get his elbows under his shoulders, like that, and draw up his knees a bit, and push _up_ \--

His head spun. He didn't even see the floor coming up to meet him until he'd smacked into it. He lay there, dry retching with one arm clamped over his stomach and his other hand grasping at his head.

Somewhere above him, a cellphone snapped shut. “That bad?” asked Bunny, voice expressionless. He stared down at Kotetsu with an expression Kotetsu had previously seen only in hardened serial-killers who were sizing up their next victim. 

Then the blond sighed, and knelt down so that the two of them were on the same level. 

“I'm going to get you cleaned up, dried off, and put to bed.” Kotetsu was pretty sure that no one in the history of ever had ever managed to make those statement sound so ominous. Bunny paused, then added: “And you are never. Ever. Going to lecture me about my health again. Now. Let's do this.”

After a while, Kotetsu decided that it could have been worse.   
Agnes could have been there filming it for some PR documentary.

Considering how his luck had been running these last few weeks, he was sort of surprised that she wasn't. 

Bunny began to peel off his wet clothing, starting with the vest and working down. It was a slippery, awkward progress. Kotetsu tried to be helpful, but his elbow slipped and he knocked the glasses off of his partner's face. 

Bunny was quiet for a few seconds when that happened, and it was the “I'm-counting-to-ten-so-that-I-don't-punch-a-sick-person” kind of quiet. Then he informed Kotetsu that it would be helpful if Kotetsu _stayed still._

Kotetsu stayed still. He even managed to stay upright when Bunny tugged off his dress-shirt and tossed it into a corner. 

“'Ey!” Kotetsu protested. “'S a nice shirt! At least--” He stopped. Bunny had stopped. Bunny was staring at him with an expression which was the bad kind of unreadable. _Nnn_ “Oh. ...Right.”

It was a relief to his spinning head when Bunny pushed him over. He lay with his head on the crumpled-up rug and stared dizzily at the ceiling while Bunny pulled off his shoes. He shivered. The feeling of air against waterlogged skin was decidedly unpleasant, and he was glad he couldn't see what his feet looked like by this point. 

He wasn't glad that Bunny could.

Then Bunny undid his belt, roughly tugging it open. He tried to pull the dress pants down, but the wet fabric clung worse than the shirt had.

“Lift your hips,” He ordered. Because Kotetsu was Kotetsu, and couldn't do anything about being Kotetsu, even in a situation like this, he started to laugh. 

“Pervert” he panted.

Again, he got that Look, which was equal parts exasperated mother and stone-cold serial killer. Kotetsu stopped laughing, got his breathing back under control, and tried. After a few wet, panting, slithering moments that sounded (and looked) a lot less than innocent, Kotetsu was as close to naked as he was willing to get, and his classy clothes lay around the bathroom is miserable heaps.

That was when Bunny started to pull his boxers down over his hip.  
“H-hey!” Kotetsu protested. He caught at Bunny's wrist, which pretty much didn't do anything at all. 

Bunny shot him a look so scathing that Koketsu should have steamed. “Grow up. You think _I'm_ enjoying this?”

_...Urk._

Kotetsu had a decent bit of life behind him, and it had had its share of glorious moments. 

Conversely, it had also its share (maybe more than its share) of _inglorious_ moments. 

Lying there naked and shivering on the floor of his own bathroom while the partner who despised him roughly toweled him down, Kotetsu figured that if this wasn't his personal low, then the memories of anything worse could go ahead and stay dormant. 

Bunny pulled Kotetsu upright, making him sit again. He dropped a fresh towel over Kotetsu's head, and began to scrub viciously at the older man's hair. 

To be fair, he did stop when Kotetsu ~~shrieked~~ made a suitably gruff and low-pitched sound of manly distress. Kotetsu folded forward. His forehead thudded into something solid which, once he'd focused on breathing long enough for his brain to start working again, he realized had to be Barnaby's chest. 

When he tried to straighten up, only Bunny's hands braced on his shoulders saved him from ending up in the bastard's lap.

Oh, hell. Sometimes you just had to laugh. Sometimes, that was the only way to not cry. 

“What the hell?” Barnaby asked, sounding confused and also more than a little annoyed. 

“S-sorry.” Kotetsu gasped. Then his shoulders slumped. He braced his hands on the floor, trying and failing to support himself properly. The towel had slipped down over his eyes, and he was glad about that.

“...Sorry,” he said again, in a much lower voice. 

They were still for a moment. Then Barnaby went back to drying Kotetsu's hair, while keeping one hand braced on his shoulder to keep him upright.   
He wasn't quite so rough this time.

\- - -

Barnaby Brooks Jr. was somewhat of a stranger to the business of taking care of people. He'd had a difficult enough time learning how to act friendly towards them, even with Maverick's instruction and the tutelage of a retired, A-listing actor.

Sure, he'd also had first-aid training, that kind of education went with the heroing. Broken bones? Bullet holes? Shock? Hypothermia? Choking? People who'd stopped breathing but weren't properly dead yet? 

No problem. A hero should be prepared for any situation, after all. 

But. People who were just plain sick?  
For some reason, the course hadn't covered that.

Still, he figured most of it should be common sense. After a night of nausea, the better part of which had apparently been spent wet and unconscious, hydration was the immediate concern.

Accordingly, he dumped his partner on the bed, fetched a cup of water, and coerced Tiger into a position which was less of a choking hazard before insisting that he drink. 

Maybe he'd rushed things a bit too much, because a trickle of water escaped down Tiger's chin and beaded in his trademark goatee. 

Well. The cup had been full, and now it wasn't, and most of the contents had gotten into Tiger. That was good, right?

At that point, Tiger suggested a bucket. He suggested it in a choked sort of tone which also suggested that time was definitely an urgent consideration.

“W-where?” Barnaby asked, caught off-balance by the realization that he maybe could have done a better job thinking this through.

“Kitchen'sink. Unnerneath.” The sentence ended with a hiccuping sound that sent Barnaby sprinting towards the kitchen. He found the bucket, dumped its contents (bottled cleaning agents, scrubbie, old toothbrush, inexplicable handful of spare change) out on the kitchen floor, and sprinted back to the bedside.

He found Tiger curled into a half-fetal position, arms wrapped over his torso and head tucked towards his chest. Apparently the crisis had been a false alarm, because there was no trace of a mess. 

Barnaby dropped the bucket by the bedside, bit back a sigh of relief, and finally pulled the covers up over his shivering partner's hunched shoulders.

Getting Tiger out of the bathroom and into the bedroom hadn't been easy. 

Barnaby was strong-- more than reasonably strong, even without his powers activated-- and his partner wasn't a large man, but muscle weighs more than fat. Grudgingly, he had to admit that, for a guy whom Barnaby had yet to catch breaking a sweat in the heroes' gym, Tiger had one hell of a compact build. 

Not that it was doing him much good at the moment.

Barnaby watched Tiger shuffle around under the blankets, rocking a little from side to side in an attempt to draw the covers in as close to his body as possible. The effort clearly exhausted him, and after a moment he gave up and lay still.

Barnaby didn't realize he'd meant to move until he was halfway done.

He paused when he caught himself in the act, sitting on the edge of the bed and leaning over Wild Tiger with his arm around the man's back and his thumb pressing a crease into the blanket between the bed and Tiger's lower ribs. 

He stopped, frozen, _remembering--_

Barnaby's parents had done this for him. Just like this. On winter nights when he'd complained that the bed was too cold for sleeping. 

_”Just wait,”_ they'd assure him, tucking the covers in close around his body, _”it'll only take a few minutes,”_ and he'd be warm. Every time, it was true. And every time, the comforting constriction felt like an embrace that didn't go away after a few seconds, the way a goodnight hug did. 

The memory was physical.   
It _hurt._

And Tiger let out the ghost of a relieved sigh, mumbling “Thanks,” when “thanks” shouldn't have had any part in this. Barnaby's pulse was up. His heart pounded. He didn't have the faintest idea why.

Barnaby finally remembered to move, but couldn't quite believe it when his hands just kept on with what they'd started. His mind scrambled for rationalizations. It was important, he told himself, to get Tiger warm, so that Tiger would get better, so that Tiger's paperwork could get done, so that Lloyd's secretary wouldn't go homicidal. 

This was all about the paperwork.   
And about the secretary not coming to work with an AK47 under her arm.

(Tiger's arms were folded in close to his chest, and his damp hair stuck to his face, and Barnaby was noticing-- _why_ was he noticing?-- every damned detail). 

His hands passed around the perimeter of legs (folded forward, knees drawn up towards the chest), feet (one tucked under the opposite ankle), shins, stomach, chest.

Barnaby's face felt warm, which was ridiculous. Less than twenty minutes ago he'd stripped this body naked and toweled it down without feeling a thing, other than some sort of vaguely vindictive satisfaction at-- at what? He didn't even know, except that Tiger had annoyed him, had invaded the polite distance Barnaby purposefully maintained with everyone, had blundered straight into his personal space without even recognizing the lines he'd trampled on to get there.

So what if Barnaby wanted to pay back the favor? Maybe the old man would get the hint, or become self-conscious enough around Barnaby to back off.

Maybe, next time he got into trouble, he'd have sense enough to ask for help instead of _lying through his teeth_ and saying he had everything under control. Stubbornly trying to handle everything himself when he was _clearly_ incapable, the old man would get into serious trouble if he kept overreaching himself.

Teaching him a lesson, taking a little of his pride here, where it didn't matter and couldn't hurt him, was for his own good. 

But none of that explained why Barnaby was the one who felt like he'd had the ground yanked out from under him. He felt off-balance, or like his body was trying to find equilibrium in a world where gravity had stopped being predictable. 

What the hell was going on?

It was the memory. Remembering his parents, so vividly and unexpectedly had given him a shock, that was all. 

_So why is you face flushed?_ asked that inconvenient inner voice which usually only picked up on the shortcomings of other people, because Barnaby had trained it to respect that his self-confidence was a priority at all times, _And why does touching feel... why does it_ feel _?_

What was it Tiger had jokingly called him earlier? Pervert?

Good. 

This could all be Tiger's fault for putting stupid ideas into his head. 

Stupid. Ideas. 

Stupid ideas about _Kotetsu?_

Not possible. He should be able to laugh at himself, for thinking something so--

Kotetsu shifted, his eyes closed and his drowsy, unguarded face nuzzling the pillow as he sought a more comfortable angle for his neck. Then he sighed, and his breathing gradually changed, deepened, and slowed. 

He'd fallen asleep, which was good.

What was bad was that Barnaby had just sat there, _watching_ , entranced by something trivial and completely disinclined to look away.

_God. Damn. It._

\- - -

Barnaby called Antonio, and went back to work.

And filed paperwork that wasn't his.

...What? He was a _good employee_. It was a good employee sort of thing to do. It also helped him maintain the high ground in his completely unwanted and inconvenient partnership. Maverick had taught him that it was useful to keep partners just a little bit in debt. Tiger owed him a favor.

\--Owed him a big grin and a cup of coffee with too much sugar in it, according to Tiger, who delivered both on his first day back at the office, and then seemed to completely forget about the entire incident. 

Tiger kept lecturing.

Barnaby kept pretending it annoyed him. 

He drank the coffee anyway, and told the inconvenient inner voice to shut the hell up.


End file.
